Cole Perriman's Terminal Games (43 page)

It was starting to feel hopeless. Marianne had turned Elfie loose in the maze more than an hour ago, checking list after list to see if Auggie might be in any of Insomnimania’s rooms. So far, Elfie hadn’t found Auggie anywhere. Marianne was feeling dizzy from her fasting and sleeplessness, but at the same time she felt a deep, intuitive readiness. She was drifting at the edge of a dream state, but was having no trouble staying awake. It was a perfect convergence of tiredness and alertness. Her optimum moment had arrived, and she couldn’t count on holding onto it for much longer—certainly not another night.

Now I’m ready. Now I’m ready to confront him. But where the hell is he?

Why had Auggie been absent for so long? How many days had passed since his last appearance? How many days had it been since Babylonia’s torrid tryst with Mr. Zero? Marianne couldn’t remember.

“It’s the Basement we’re looking for,” Marianne whispered to Elfie. “Find the Basement.”

But Elfie apparently had no idea what sliding panel, what trap door, what revolving bookshelf might lead to Auggie’s sanctum sanctorum, his labyrinth beneath the labyrinth—his elusive Basement. Elfie drifted eastward from the Pleasure Dome until she arrived at Ernie’s Bar.

“What are you doing there, Elfie?” Marianne complained. “We’ve checked Ernie’s at least four times now.”

But Elfie hovered insistently over the icon.

“All right, all right,” Marianne said grumpily. “We’ll check again, if that makes you happy.”

Marianne clicked the “who?” command, and the list began with all-too-familiar names …

“wunderkind, fishbate, twolip, hejhog, loosy, supersloth …”

… but there, in the midst of them, was the name they had both been looking for:

“awgy.”

Marianne released a deep exhalation of relief and anticipation.

“Thank you, Elfie,” Marianne whispered. “Thank you for being right this time.”

At last Marianne, in the guise of Elfie, was about to face Auggie. But she had to make sure she was absolutely prepared. She checked to see which of her nostrils was clear, which clogged, and found that she could breathe easily through the left.

Perfect
.

Her right hemisphere was dominant—it was just the state of mind she wanted.

Marianne double-clicked the Ernie’s Bar icon, and Elfie immediately found herself standing before the swinging doors. Tinkly piano music emerged from inside Ernie’s. Elfie swept the doors aside with a noisy creak and walked into the smoky, dimly-lit saloon. All the usual mutated clientele were in attendance. Ernie the bartender was wiping down the bar with a towel.

“Hi Elfie,” Ernie said over the computer speaker in his standardized manner. “Want the usual?”

Elfie would normally have responded with a verbal request for a glass of white wine. But this time she said nothing. Her eyes immediately fell upon Auggie, who was seated in a booth on the opposite side of the room. Auggie was staring directly at her with his frozen clown grin. He gestured to her with one of his white-gloved hands. Elfie walked through the noisy saloon and sat across the table from Auggie.

*

“That’s Elfie!” Nolan almost shouted, as the green, pointy-eared character sauntered across the bar and sat down across from Auggie. “That’s Marianne!”

“Looks like it,” Maisie observed. The five men were crowded around the monitor.

“Well, what the hell’s she doing in there?” Nolan exclaimed. “She promised me! She said she’d stay out of Insomnimania! She said she’d stay away from Auggie!”

“She lied,” Maisie said with a shrug.

“What are they doing in that booth?” Nolan asked.

“Talking, I guess,” Maisie said. “That’s what people do in the booths at Ernie’s.”

“Why can’t we see what they’re saying?”

“Because the booth is for private conversations.”

“You can break in, can’t you?”

“Well, sure, but …”

“Then do it!”
Nolan exclaimed.

“Grobowski, you’ve asked us to bend our own rules left and right,” Maisie pleaded. “We’ve done everything we can to accommodate you, but please don’t ask me to eavesdrop on your girlfriend. You ought to trust her to know what she’s doing. And right now, she looks like she’s got things perfectly under control. How would you feel if she started listening in on your phone conversations?”

“Damn it, Maisie, she’s talking with a murderer! I want to know what they’re saying!”

“You’d better do what he says, Baldy,” Pritchard said softly. “She could be in more danger than she realizes. Rules are rules, but we don’t want anybody else getting hurt—or killed.”

“All right, all right,” Maisie grumbled. “If everybody’s going to gang up on me about it.”

Maisie struck a command, and the word balloons for the conversation between Auggie and Elfie began to appear on the computer monitor.

*

“Elfie, my dear,” Auggie said. “It’s been a long time—much too long.”

“I agree,” Elfie said.

“I thought that we agreed to keep in better touch with each other.”

“I’ve been looking for you,” Elfie replied. “You’re the one who’s been missing.”

Marianne noticed that the semi-hallucinatory sense of audio communication was already quite strong.

“Me?” Auggie replied. “Why, I’ve been right here all the time. I’m always here.”

“You haven’t been in Ernie’s Bar.”

“No. I’ve been
here.”

“And where do you mean by ‘here’?”

Auggie shrugged. “‘Here’ means ‘everywhere.’ You ought to know that by now, dear Elfie. And you ought to know that
everywhere
is a very specific, very special place. If you look—really look—you can find me
everywhere.”

“When you say
everywhere,”
Elfie replied, “you mean the Basement, don’t you?”

Auggie nodded and raised his glass of stout in a toast-like gesture.

“You know about the Basement, then?” Auggie said.

“Of course,” Elfie said.

“Smart girl. I knew you’d figure it out.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ve missed you,” Auggie said. “And Mr. Zero has missed his voluptuous Babylonia.”

“I’m sure the feeling is mutual—for both me and Babylonia,” Elfie replied with smiling politeness.

“Shall we retire to the Basement, then?” Auggie asked, with a leering wiggle of his eyebrows. “To my personal
everywhere?”

Marianne measured Elfie’s next words carefully. Elfie had to seem more knowledgeable than she really was, but at the same time not betray her ignorance. Marianne certainly did not want to tip Auggie off that she didn’t know how to get Elfie into the Basement—much less that neither she nor Elfie had any idea what sort of place the Basement really was.

“Oh, but that’s rather a drastic step, isn’t it?” Elfie said.

“More than drastic,” said Auggie. “Life altering.
Eternity
altering. But then—you know that already.”

Marianne felt a slight shudder.

What does he mean?

“I thought we might talk a little first,” Elfie said.

“Talk, talk, talk,” grumbled Auggie jadedly. “We could spend eons talking. Not that we don’t
have
all of time, but … why not seize the moment?”

A brief lull fell over the conversation. Marianne didn’t know what Elfie should say next. She knew she had to stall Auggie about going to the Basement—at least until she could find out how Elfie could follow him there.

“You’re uncharacteristically inhibited this evening, my dear,” Auggie finally said, breaking the silence. “You ought to have a little drink to help you unwind and relax. Your usual white wine, perhaps?”

“No,” Elfie said. “I thought we might carry on our chat someplace more private.”

Auggie gestured expansively.

“The
booth is
private,” he said. “No one can hear anything we say.”

“But there are so many distractions here,” Elfie said.

And indeed, Ernie’s Bar was far from calm and quiet, even inside the booth. The preprogrammed barroom chatter and the ragtime piano music rang over the computer speakers, and one could almost choke on the dense-looking cigar and cigarette smoke.

“But of course, you are quite correct,” Auggie said gallantly. “We must retire to a more serene place of your choosing, a place where you can contemplate the wondrous step you are about to take. Let us go there—at once!”

Suddenly, Auggie’s eyes rolled zanily in their sockets, spinning in opposite directions, and the computer speaker roared with bells, sirens, bicycle horns, and calliope music. Then, in a flash, Auggie was gone.

Marianne groaned aloud.

What a time for him to pull his disappearing act! How am I supposed to find him now?
Where
am I supposed to find him now?

She mentally replayed the words he had just spoken …

“We must retire to a more serene place of your choosing.”

A lot of choice you gave me, you little freak.

But then she thought the matter through. If Auggie
had
given her the opportunity to consider the question, where might she have suggested that they meet? Where was her favorite room on the maze?

Marianne knew the answer immediately.

Following the usual protocol, Marianne directed Elfie out of the booth and across the saloon floor. Ernie himself was, as usual, washing glasses behind the bar. He offered his stock end of the night audio salutation.

“Be seeing you tomorrow night, Elfie?”

Marianne struck the command for Elfie to give her own stock reply.

“Could be, Ernie. It’s been swell.”

Elfie walked out through the swinging doors. Marianne double-clicked, placing Elfie in the desktop maze again. Without any hesitation, Marianne directed Elfie north-northeast toward the Babbage Beach icon. When Elfie reached the icon, Marianne double clicked without even bothering to read the “who?” list.

Suddenly, Elfie found herself standing on the beach, the white noise surf resounding soothingly and the bright orange sun still high in the sky. A little farther down the beach, under the red-and-white umbrella where the virtual Renee had sat during those two poignant conversations, was Auggie.

The clown just sat there for a moment, looking out to sea. Then he turned and saw Elfie. He gaily gestured for Elfie to come and sit down beside him. She did so.

“How did you know?” Elfie asked.

“Know what?”

“That I would choose to come here?”

“Well, this is your favorite place, isn’t it? You think of it as ‘the edge,’ I believe. The
edge of
humanity, the
edge
of the culture. It’s a strange figure of speech, though—in an electronic world
without
edges, where all possibilities are endless.”

Marianne felt a cold shiver.

“How do you know what I think?” Elfie asked.

“Because I’m eternal,” Auggie said, his smile softening with a certain sadness. “Being eternal means knowing everything—absolutely everything.”

*

Nolan, Clayton, Maisie, Gusfield, and Pritchard were still huddled around the computer monitor. The air had grown hot and thin, reminding Nolan of that unpleasant experience in the observation booth watching Myron Stalnaker’s deposition back in Omaha.

The five men had just witnessed Auggie’s abrupt disappearance from Ernie’s Bar. Then Maisie had followed Elfie to Babbage Beach. When Elfie clicked into the beach, they saw her walk toward one of the red and white beach umbrellas and sit down beneath it.

That was all.

Except for Elfie, Babbage Beach appeared to he totally deserted.

“Looks like your girlfriend got stood up,” Maisie said to Nolan.

“Very funny,” Nolan replied.

But Nolan actually felt a deep sense of relief at Auggie’s disappearance.

That’ll teach her to go playing Nancy Drew. I’m going to give her a real talking to before the night’s
over, though.

The men watched in silence for a few moments longer. Elfie didn’t appear to be doing much—just repeating a simple loop of actions that included tracing her finger in the sand and nodding her head now and again.

“Not a lot to look at,” Maisie remarked. “Guess she’s got some idea that Auggie’s still going to show up. Chicks sure can get stubborn when guys dump them.”

“We’d better keep watching, though,” Nolan said. “Maybe she knows something we don’t know. Maybe Auggie
will
show up again.”

“Well, there’s no point in us staring at this damn thing,” Maisie said. “If he comes back, my alarm will go off again.”

Maisie shut down his terminal and the five men regrouped more comfortably. They resumed their previous discussion—making the most educated guesses possible as to how Auggie operated, how he manifested himself throughout Insomnimania, how he could even exist.

Nolan tried to keep his attention focused on the conversation, but he was getting tired. Postulating the existence of a living, conscious being whose existence was literally
shared
among an indeterminate number of human brains was, indeed, exhausting work. It had been a long day, starting in Omaha, picking up some hours on the return trip, and still continuing here long after dark. Besides, all five of the men had been stuffing themselves on Pritchard’s limitless stash of junk food. Nolan, at least, was feeling a bit jangled.

Tired and wired. The perfect state of mind in which to contemplate Auggie.

“But Auggie doesn’t affect everybody on Insomnimania,” Clayton was saying. “Whatever is happening, it’s only happening to some people.”

“I haven’t developed a psychological profile yet,” Gusfield said. “But some people must be particularly susceptible. They aren’t necessarily people who suffered childhood traumas. I’d almost bet that few of them ever did. It’s more like they traumatized
themselves
in adulthood. They lost themselves in a tangle of common sense, societal rules, ideas and images of respectability and success.”

Clayton laughed harshly. “That’s not hard to profile,” he said. “Look at the people whose names we’ve picked up. Professionals and executives—some successful, some not.”